The Penguin is free from prison, and has taken up a new career — as a crime fighter! Not only that, he’s started protecting rich people’s jewels from criminals. Batman and Robin are convinced that the Penguin plans to steal the jewels, but when they try to replace them with fakes in order to catch him, they’re caught themselves, and become wanted criminals!

With the help of Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara, they fake their own deaths until they can find out what the Penguin’s really up to. It turns out he’s planning to marry the beautiful actress Sophia Starr — or rather, he’s planning to skip the wedding with all the presents but remain a bachelor.

The Goodies
Batman
Believes precision is the key to success, in life as well as sports. When Robin points out that they might get arrested themselves for switching the jewels, he replies “That’s a chance we have to take Robin. In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential”, but in this story at least he genuinely seems to believe he’s above the law — he did break into someone else’s property and attempt to steal their jewels, without a shred of evidence of wrongdoing, and he hides out from the police rather than give himself up.

Alfred
Goes undercover again, this time posing as an assessor for the insurance company “Floyds of Dublin”, and like his employers adds assault to his other crimes when caught by the Penguin, in order to get away. His cover stories for getting Bruce and Dick away from Aunt Harriet are getting flimsier — this time he merely tells them that they have a phone call from “Mr K Rime”.

Batman and Robin don’t bother to tell him that their deaths are only faked, and he seems quite distraught when the news of their deaths is announced on TV.
The Baddies
The Penguin
“That waddling, pompous, master of foul play!”

While the Penguin at first appears to have gone straight, this turns out to be an act. He sings gleefully about being a bachelor, and chooses prison over marrying a beautiful, rich, woman who loves him. He hangs around in saunas with semi-naked men, but claims to hate the heat — when Batman asks him why he would do that if he hates heat so much, he replies “I ask you, is that an ethical question between crimefighters? Competitors, you might say?”

There may…there just may…possibly be a little subtext in this. A smidgen.

The Penguin also eats what are claimed to be sardines (but look more like spaghetti in mayonnaise) out of a gigantic jar, by the handful.

The Penguin’s Fine Fluffy Finks
Generic goons again, this time called Eagle-Eye and Dove. They have these names written on their tops even when performing robberies for the Penguin to foil.

The Gadgets
We see the Batcycle for the first time — a slightly modified 1965 Harley-Davidson with a sidecar for Robin.

Batman and Robin both have bulletproof soles on their shoes. The other major gadget is what sounds like an “electric ion loop control” (though West mumbles the line so much it could be literally anything) used to disarm an alarm.

The Penguin has trick umbrellas including, amongst other things, a bulletproof umbrella, a dry ice shooter, a “high powered demagnetiser coil”, a bug detector, and umbrellas full of cement for dropping on his enemies’ heads.

The Batmobile
Becomes the Birdmobile, temporarily, as the Penguin steals it after the Dynamic Duo’s “deaths”, not knowing that as well as the new bulletproofing they’d installed, it also has a remote control that allows Batman to eject passengers, open the doors, and steer the car, as well as a spy camera sending footage of everything the Penguin does back to Batman.

What’s New?
We get several new things in one interrogation scene — the first time Batman goes into a darkened police cell and uses his shadow to intimidate a criminal, the first time we see the police threaten physical violence (Chief O’Hara being the bad cop, held back by good cop Gordon), and the first use of “You guys must read too many comic books!”

Review
The story starts with a masked armed robber using a machine gun to carry out a plan put together by one of the top Batman villains. Batman goes into a darkened police cell to intimidate a prisoner who’s just been threatened with violence, and who faints in terror after Batman scares him so much. The Gotham police department are willing to cover up for Batman’s crimes, and to help him fake his own death, which is announced on live TV after a car chase and shootout. Even Alfred believes Batman is dead. Batman switches from using his Batmobile to a sleek two-wheeled vehicle…

This isn’t one of the Nolan films, this is the 1966 series, and yet many of the elements of this story, both major and minor, are the kind of thing that recur time and again throughout Batman’s appearances in film and TV.

Unsurprisingly, this story is co-written by Lorenzo Semple jr. More than anyone else involved in the TV series, he understood that what made the series work was a careful control of the level of absurdity. Many of the other writers just string a bunch of absurd situations together with no thought as to basic plot logic, leading to something which isn’t camp, just lazy, and is only saved by the performances of the main cast.

Semple, by contrast, writes what could easily be perfectly straight adventure stories (once you get past the fact that the villains are all bizarre characters interested in low-stakes themed robberies, anyway), but which have one eyebrow very slightly raised. The humour in Semple’s stories comes not from people saying “look, we’re doing something rubbish!”, but rather from taking a single absurd situation and playing it all absolutely straight, as if it was deathly important.

This is the series at its peak — fresh, clever, and funny, for adults, and with a knowing subversive element (the hints at the Penguin’s homosexuality would have been terribly close to the bone for 1966), but with enough blood-curdling chills and death-defying escapes to appeal to the children. As good as it gets.

This post first appeared on my Patreon as all these posts do. Thanks to my patrons’ generosity, you can also hear it as a podcast — all my posts will be podcasted, as long as my Patreon donations remain over $100 per month.

Man walks into a bar. Wants to find someone to talk to about comics. He is shunned and dismissed as an irritant. The man leaves the bar and goes on the internet and tries to find someone to talk to about comics. The man finds Matthew Craig, Adam Englebright and James Wheeler. Together they make a podcast which people hear around the globe. The man imagines that the people who shunned him in the bar must be feeling pretty silly now. Yeah.

No blurb here people. Nothing to see. That chalky outline you see there? That’s where a blurb used to be. Good blurb. An honest blurb. Till some punk just walked up to it, blew it away. Now this town got one less blurb in it, and ain’t it just that little bit colder for it?

<ITEM> Well well well. Well. Well? Good, then let’s bear down for midterms with SILENCE!, the podcast that walks like a monkey and smells like one too. Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die skirt the very outskirts of professionalism in the way that only they can.

<ITEM> Sponsorshibboleth, SILENCE! News reports on the hott comixzz nuce from SDCC, The Beast Must Die talks the Cindy & Biscuit entry at TV Tropes, and we unveil the shambolic SILENCE! Patreon!

Doug stepped out into the sunlight, blinking. His dressing gown lolled open, exposing his paunch. Tina’s vest top, pulled on accidentally in his rush to get outside barely covered it and the thick black hair on his belly poked out obscenely. In one hand he held a spatula; the other reached reflexively into the dressing gown pocket for the lighter he knew wasn’t there. Last night’s beer emanated from his stale mouth and he rubbed his tongue across his teeth. He wanted to belch but found he couldn’t. Taking his eyes from the sky for a moment he glanced to his left. Kathy was stood on her front lawn, gazing upward with her mouth hanging slackly open. Her two year old hung at her legs, pulling on her arm sleeve whining in a low, insistent tone. Across the road the Petersons crowded around their camper van, all staring up.

The vast alien structure that hovered high above them was still humming it’s deep bass tone and rotating slowly. The bone like growths that sprouted from it creaked as they slowly undulated. The noise was awful, too much, too loud for Sunday morning. Doug couldn’t take his eyes from it, but his brain had already started to hanker for a Bloody Mary. Just as he was trying to remember if the tomato juice was still okay to drink, a jagged split opened up in the base of the structure. And that’s when it really began.

<ITEM> There’s a fresh crop of admin, waiting to be picked, with nosey bouquets of Sponsorship and more Christopher Walken than you can shake a (Walken) stick at. It’s time for a new SILENCE! the only podcast that predates the discovery of the moon. Seasoned pod jockeys The Beast Must Die and gary Lactus are joined by new season recruit Bobsy, and the fun flows like lava,

]]>http://mindlessones.com/2015/07/06/silence-148/feed/16The Failure of The Filthhttp://mindlessones.com/2015/07/02/the-failure-of-the-filth/
http://mindlessones.com/2015/07/02/the-failure-of-the-filth/#commentsThu, 02 Jul 2015 23:33:26 +0000Illogical Volumehttp://mindlessones.com/?p=33334The five people who are eagerly awaiting my book on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s pestilent fantasy The Filth will note that the book has still not been released yet.

That I have failed to finish this project in time for the release of the hardcover edition of The Filth will surprise no one who has retained interest in the project for this long. The fact that said hardcover contains just the bare minimum of fresh material – a script for issue #6, some sketches that make the book even more difficult to read on the bus, the reheated contents of the charmingly crap Crack Comicks website – will also fail surprise anyone with a basic understanding of both comics and capitalism.

Good little enemy of the entertainment complex that I am, I paid to consume The Filth for the third time anyway. The hardback edition simulates the glossy colouring of the single issues rather than the battered bog roll of the trade paperback. It offers the reader a sense of solidity, of lasting luxury, that the previous editions lacked.

The Filth is a disgusting, slippery mess of a book. As Terrance Moreua said in the comments to one of my preview posts:

The visual grammar of The Filth is all over the place. The discontinuity being part of the point, of course. There are times when it seems to be Morrison’s script callouts (the tv cameras) and times when it seems to be Weston (background texture effects, etc) and times where it’s really fucking hard to tell (the goddamn photoshop transform tool effect to signify getting squeezed into the crack, or getting your personality fucked with in psychedelisex)…

Essentially, I find The Filth to be textually rich, garishly colored, expressively acted, disgustingly rendered and more. But comparatively poorly composed. I think there are too many components fighting for interplay. And while that’s part of the larger point, I think a little less noise and little more signal would have heightened the contrast between the two much better.

The nefarious Catwoman is up to her old tricks — she steals two cat statues, belonging to millionaire Mark Andrews. It seems at first like she’s planning to steal Andrews’ entire collection, but in fact she has something else in mind. The two cat statues, supposedly identical, have different markings on them, which when placed together form a map leading to the treasure of legendary pirate Captain Manx.

Catwoman double-crosses her goon (her other goon having been defeated by Batman and Robin) and takes the loot for herself. But when pursued by the Dynamic Duo, she falls down a bottomless pit, and is seemingly dead for good…but as Batman says, cats have nine lives.

The Goodies

Batman

Teaches Robin 3D chess (on a Raumschach board, rather than the type later used in Star Trek), saying “It’s actually quite rudimentary, Dick, you just have to think fourteen moves ahead, that’s all.”

Considers motorist safety important enough to lecture Robin on using his safety belt, even when the Batmobile is only going a couple of blocks.

Batman would rather pay to enter the Gotham City Exposition, like any other citizen, than use his status to gain free entry. He doesn’t, however, have a problem with people in the queue letting him go ahead of them.

He never gambles, and he believes that “evil is as evil does”. He has a vast storehouse of audio engineering knowledge.

Robin

Seems notably brighter than in previous episodes. While normally he finds his schoolwork difficult, here his response to finding 3D chess difficult is to say “Gosh Bruce, I think I’ll just stick to Latin crossword puzzles”.

When tied up in a death trap by Catwoman, about to be fed to a tiger, he tells her “Catwoman, you are not a nice person!”. We also know, because the deathtrap involves Robin being balanced by a counterweight, that he weighs 132lb 7oz.

Epithets used: “Holy Reshevsky!” (a reference to Samuel Reshevsky, an American chess player best known for his rivalry with the more famous Bobby Fischer), “Holy trickery!”, “Holy cats! A cat!”, “Holy icepicks!”, “Holy felony!”, “Holy geography!”
The Baddies

Catwoman

“You feline devil!”

Catwoman is here played by Julie Newmar, the first female villain in the series to make the same kind of mark as Frank Gorshin, Cesar Romero, or Burgess Meredith. Newmar was a Tony Award-winning actor in the theatre before making the transition into TV, where she had much the same career as most of the female guest-stars in the series, appearing like many of them in both The Monkees and Star Trek (two programmes which had considerable overlap in audience and style with Batman). However, Newmar’s appearance as Catwoman was considerably more memorable than most of the other guest stars, to the point that some thirty years later, Newmar’s name was recognisable enough that she was named in the title of the film To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar

The character of Catwoman originated in Batman #1, the same comic that introduced the character of the Joker and told Batman’s origin story. Originally called The Cat, Catwoman was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane as a beautiful, seductive, cat burglar who worked on both sides of the law — starting off as a burglar, she became an ally of Batman and Robin, before going back to her criminal ways. The character hadn’t been used in the comics since 1954, however, as the Comics Code Authority, which came into being following a moral panic about the content of comics, had strict rules about how women must be portrayed. The character returned to the comics as a result of this story, and has been a regular ever since.

The CCA would not have liked Newmar’s Catwoman. While the Catwoman of the comics had been dressed in a relatively demure calf-length purple dress, this Catwoman is dressed in a leather catsuit resembling the costumes worn by Cathy Gale in The Avengers, uses a cat-of-nine-tails on her enemies and henchmen alike, and has claws on her gloves sharp enough to cut through glass.

Catwoman is obsessed with cats — not only does she have several pet cats, commit cat-themed crimes, have her headquarters in the Gato & Chat Fur Company, and use a cat-of-nine-tails, but she also seems to theme things around the syllable “cat”, trapping our heroes in catacombs, and drugging Robin with catechol. She also bases one of her traps for Batman around the famous short story The Lady, or the Tiger?, with herself behind one door and a tiger behind another. She likes to toy with her victims, and puts them in fake traps before the real one.

Catwoman’s Goons

Two rather camp, and self-interested, characters, more fully fleshed out than the standard Batman goon. Leo, the taller, is played by Jock Mahoney, who had previously starred as Tarzan in two of the later films in the series, while Felix, the nebbishy Italian-American short one, is played by Ralph Manza, a respected comic character actor who you will recognise from pretty much every single American film and TV series made between 1954 and 2000 (everything from I Married A Monster From Outer Space! to Friends, via The Twilight Zone and Blazing Saddles).

The Gadgets

The Batometer can trace radiation within a radius of fifty miles. Batman and Robin have Bat-communicators which look like walkie-talkies, but if the polarity is reversed, they can give out a piercing shriek at 20,000 decibels, which the narrator says is enough to split a tiger’s skull. This may be true — decibels are on a logarithmic scale, and so this would be 10^19880 (that’s a one with 19880 zeroes after it) times as loud as the loudest sound the human ear can hear without permanent damage (the loudest sound in known history is believed to have been a volcanic eruption in 1815 which was as loud as 14,000 one-megaton nuclear explosions — that was about 320 decibels). Luckily, Batman has Bat-earplugs, which allow him to escape unharmed.

Batman also has knuckledusters with claw-like protruberances, which he can use to climb walls.

The Batmobile

By sticking a giant hose (the “auxiliary power channel”) into the Batmobile’s exhaust, it’s possible to collect a traceable radioactive gas, but the Batmobile has to be generating 17,000kw of power at the time. It has a Batbeam laser that can be used to blow locks, a lead-shielded compartment in which radioactive material can be safely stored, and an automatic tyre repair device.

What’s New?

This is the first story to feature Catwoman on screen, and the first anywhere to have her newer, and rather more sexual, look.

Review

A genuinely excellent, funny, well-directed story, this has some wonderful lines — “You’re right again, Batman, we might have been killed.” “Or worse.”, “I’ve heard that song before, Catwoman, the last few bars are always the same, and the criminal is always behind them.”

While it’s better acted and directed than several previous stories, though, what’s interesting about this story is the sheer level of sexual tension between Batman and Catwoman — at least in the script; Batman is, of course, played as entirely oblivious. Catwoman gets lines that are barely single entendres, like “All good things must come to an end, and the goodest end I can think of is yours”, and is dressed in what amounts to fetish wear (one thing it’s sadly almost impossible not to discover when reading anything at all about this series is how many American men now in their sixties had their first sexual awakening while watching this story, to the extent that this overshadows everything else).

We’ve seen before how, despite being a light children’s show, Batman dealt almost in passing with the ideas and events of its time. It’s often probably not even conscious, but any kind of narrative has to take on a shape that reflects the concerns of the people creating it.

In this case, though, it is definitely deliberate — a woman dressed in skintight leather, carrying a cat of nine tails, and telling a cringing man to brush her pussy willow, is about as far from subtle as one can get. And so here we must touch, briefly (though it’s a subject to which we will of course return) on the subject of the so-called Sexual Revolution.

Contra Larkin, sexual intercourse did not begin in 1963, but while every generation likes to think it invented sex (if nothing else so they can avoid thinking about what their parents got up to), there really was a fairly massive change in societal attitudes towards sex in the US (and to a slightly lesser extent elsewhere) in the 1960s. The combination of the discovery of penicillin (allowing most STDs to be cured quickly and easily), the invention of the contraceptive pill (removing fears of pregnancy), and most importantly the growth of car culture to the extent that many teenagers had their own cars (giving them a private space, however cramped, away from their parents), caused a change in attitudes that means that the 1960s was almost a tenth of a percent as revolutionary as Baby Boomer nostalgists insist it was.

That change was the driving force behind almost all the other changes of that decade; changes whose repercussions we are still feeling. And it was far from an unalloyed good — while the greater sexual freedom we have now is definitely a good thing, much of the sexual experimentation of the 60s and 70s involved, in one way or another, exploiting women, objectifying them, or putting intolerable pressure on them. “Free love” was a lot freer for the men than for the women who had to bear its costs.

In this context, the fetishising of Catwoman can now look more than a little dodgy — the character is clearly created for the male gaze, and bears all the marks of a Strong Female Character. The problematic aspects of the 1960s attitudes towards both sex and women are all too apparent. But in the context of her time, Catwoman was a fantastically freeing character, compared to the standard portrayals of women on TV. This is a woman who is clearly in control of her own sexuality, and able to take pleasure in it, and to do so with a sense of humour. She’s in control of all the men in the story all the way through (until the very last scene, of course, but even there her destruction doesn’t come from her sexuality but from her avarice).

With the benefit of hindsight we can know that the bad points of this characterisation would become a constant in geek “culture” up to the present day (and if you ever look at the Catwoman page on the Batman wiki you’ll want to scrub yourself for a week afterwards), but this story can’t be blamed for that.

What we have here is a light, funny, clever story that is fundamentally on the right side, and it’s simply impossible not to like it.
Personnel

Cast

Adam West: Batman

Burt Ward: Robin

Julie Newmar: Catwoman

Alan Napier: Alfred

Neil Hamilton: Commissioner Gordon

William Dozier: Narrator

Crew

William Dozier: Executive Producer/Creator

Stanley Ralph Ross and Lee Orgel: Writers

James Sheldon: Director

This post originally appeared on my Patreon, as all these posts do. Thanks to my patrons’ generosity, you can also hear it as a podcast — all my posts will be podcasted, as long as my Patreon donations remain over $100 per month.

Angela Grimcock grabbed David’s shotgun from out of the umbrella stand, adjusted her reading spectacles. and looked in the mirror. Running a calloused hand through her blue rinsed hair she checked one last time that she had a hankie tucked up her sleeve. She fished a warm Werthers original from her pocket, unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth. Then she unlocked the door to 43 Arkensword Avenue and stepped into the maelstrom.

Mr Grainger came first, lurching through her Begonias, his face contorted with rage. His skin was mottled purple and red, and his black, swollen tongue poked out of his distended jaw. From a tear in his argyle sweater a new eye swivelled and blinked furiously. He was holding the remains of Miracle, his once beloved Daschund in one lumpen fist, and the small dog’s head lolled and buffeted against his trouser leg. With a strangled scream he launched towards Angela; she raised the shotgun towards her neighbour and pulled the trigger. Mr Grainger caught the blast fully in the chest and he was backflipped smartly over the Begonias, and into the water feature. David’s tasteful Japanese water sculpture bubbled crimson as Mr Grainger, one-time head of the Rotary club and organiser of the Salvation Army jumble sale expired with a keening wheeze, like a whoopy cushion.

Out of the corner of her eye Angela spotted the Bishop boy sliding his way around into her yard. She’d never liked him ever since she caught him urinating on her herb garden as a 5 year old. Now, as his twisted body flipped and swivelled on new joints and three mouths snapped like castanets, she finally took her revenge. The first shot took his arm off at the shoulder and spun him like a top; the second caught him above the back of the neck and his his head disintegrated. Pieces of him dashed against the garden fence and his spasming body collapsed like a deflating bouncy castle on a warm summer afternoon.

“It’s going to be a long Saturday” said Angela, with a grimace. “And I don’t even have a blessed drop of milk in the house. Black tea – it really is the end!”

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<ITEM> Podcasts bruv, they’re a game of two halves bruv in’t they bruv? Into the hallowed grounds of the Reviewniverse we go, with The Beast doing a run down of screen-printed hipster fest ELCAF, and discussing Adam Cadwell’s Blood Blokes, Charles Forsman’s Hobo Mom, John Cei Douglas’ Show Me The Map of Your Heart, Rachael Smith’s I Am Fire and Darren Cullen’s Below.

And then the robot walked up to the man and he said get out of town because you are a criminal but the man who was an evil genius cowboy said i’m not getting out of town in fact i will rob the bank and then he got his gang ane they did a raid on the bank and stole all of the robot money. All the robots cried and said oh who will help us but then spacehorse flew down and said i am spacehorse i am the heroic horse from space and i have super powers and can fly and the robots said the evil genius cowboy stole our money so spacehorse said i will help you and so he flew off. Later the evil genius cowboy and his gang were laughing and shooting guns in the air and counting all the robot money but then spacehorse flew down from the sky and he used his eye lazers and cut the evil genius cowboys gang in half and the evil genius cowboy tied to run away but spacehorse melted his hat and then flew up and then down really fast and landed on his head with his hooves which are made of space metal and the evil genius cowboys head popped like a balloon. Spacehorse flew the money back to town and all the robots threw spacehorse a party and they all drank and ate and fell asleep. While they were all sleeping spacehorse stole all their robot money and flew off and also did an atomic horse poo on the robot town and blew it up. Then spacehorse and the teen riders all had another party.

THE END

<ITEM> Welcome gentlefolk to the internet’s first, last and only comics podcast…SILENCE! with your decrepid hosts Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die. No-one make any sudden moves and it should all be okay.

<ITEM> Come one, come all to the hallowed fields of ADMIN, with a healthy dose of Sponsorsize (featuring GOSH! and Dave’s Comics), a bit more Geesin Bros love and a surprising lack of deviations and whimsical meandering. There must be something in the air.

<ITEM> What’s that peeping out through the clouds? Why it’s only the flipping Reviewniverse, and wearing it’s special trousers as well! Hello big fella! A bumper crop of comics as well, and a shocking level of syncronisation from the boys reading patterns. Anyone would think they were beginning to get their shiz together after 146 episodes. In the sights this week All Star Section 8, Midnighter, Constantine, Omega Men, Batman, Bizarro, Injection, Crossed 100, Saga, Blubber, It will All Hurt, Nameless, Captain Avengers and the Mighty Americas, the f*cking Carol Corps?!, 21st Century Tank Girl and more.

HE LIES ON HIS SIDE IS HE TRYING TO HIDE? IN FACT IT’S THE EARTH THAT HE’S KNOWN SINCE BIRTH

“Cor blimey stroike a loight guvnor, wos all this about then, cor blimey ain’t I yer bloody great sod! I tell ye what me ol choina, this eer’s a roight rum bloody lark an no mistake ain’t it? It’s been rainin apples and soddin pears all day an I’m soaked to the effin bone I am guvnor, stroike a light guv an I even seen me fancy dolly bird all day noither…”

CUT! Why the f*ck did you hire an American actor to do this blurb? For f*cks sake this is a total write off. F*ckin amateurs…

<ITEM> Admin, admin getcher self some admin! I’ve got a brand new pair of Sponsorskates…Gosh Comics and Dave’s Comics? You know the drill. PLUS the boys have a celebrity friend bake off – Gary Lactus lunges with Warwick Johnson Cadwell and Tank Girl and The Beast parries with James Stokoe and Orc Stain.

I have no idea what this comic is. I cannot it read it. It renders reading impossible. What is that smell? No, that’s too kind a word for it. Stench is too florid, too learned. This comic doesn’t smell, it hums. Is it glue? My mind tells me that it must be, glue or something like it, some aspect of the binding.

It’s not the staples though, staples could never smell like this. It’s the glue. That’s what my brain tells me, but there’s another reaction, a deeper one. Probably just a different function of the brain. Definitely that. And yet it also feels like it’s a function of the body. I know, I know, all parts of the same system, but it’s like hearing a lion scream at you in the zoo: you know there are physical and social constraints preventing the brute from eviscerating you but part of you is still howling to run!

It’s only a comic, just a mess of words and pictures on the page, just paper and ink. Ink doesn’t smell like this, does it? Probably not even if you use it wrong. No, I can’t read it, I want to get rid of it, I need to get it out of my house, need to wash the smell of it off me.

]]>http://mindlessones.com/2015/06/08/i-am-not-a-comics-critic-3-wandering-worst-bits/feed/0Ghost World: Song #1http://mindlessones.com/2015/06/05/ghost-world-song-1/
http://mindlessones.com/2015/06/05/ghost-world-song-1/#commentsFri, 05 Jun 2015 12:27:20 +0000Illogical Volumehttp://mindlessones.com/?p=33205A few thoughts on Dan Clowes’ Ghost World, as previously presented as part of this extended discussion of what that comic is and how we should read it:

I’m going to side step this fascinating discussion of formalism/post-structuralism/intentionality because otherwise I’ll either get so bogged down in it that I don’t find time to talk about Ghost World or I’ll say something stupid about being a “post-structuralist intentionalist” or spam the world with idiotic diagrams I’ve just thrown together on Paint or whatever…

Let’s talk about a grubbier aspect of what we’re talking about when we talk about Ghost World, namely the packaging, how it’s been sold and re-sold, whether it’s got a picture of Thora Birch on the cover (I don’t think any such edition exists, but maybe I’m wrong). The stuff you’re not supposed to judge it by, basically, despite the fact that this but into all that good “literary” stuff about intention, reception, and interpretation in a tangible way.

After all, the sort of intentions and expectations you read a comic with will be different if you read it as one strip amongst many in Clowes’ Eightball than they are if you read it as a graphic novel, or as the source material for a movie that left you slightly unsatisfied but curious enough to read more.

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that all of the critiques of the comic that were raised during the London Graphic Novel Network’s examination of the series relate to its failure as an extended narrative, but that does seem to be a recurring theme, and I think that’s pretty fair. There are notes of epiphanic ambiguity that seem to be aspiring towards the status of the literary short story, just as there were in various other Clowes strips from that era, but these are too rote and underdeveloped to hold much appeal in themselves.

The pleasures of the strip, for me, are more in line with the pleasures of more traditional comics: Who are Enid and Rebecca going to rip the piss out of today? What sort of grotesques is Clowes going to draw? What pop culture artifact is going to be re-consumed and found to have a bitter aftertaste? How’s that mouse going to bam up Offissa Pup this week? How’s the landscape going to shift as the brick hits Krazy? What’s caused that look on Charlie’s face?

Like the best comic strips Ghost World has a distinct mood, a distinct visual style, a set of preoccupations, and a handful of instantly understandable characters. In this case: at once overbearingly cynical and prematurely nostalgic, buck-toothed caricature with a one-tone melancholy overlay, the impossibility of accessing the past through the objects that have survived it, a pair of teenage girls whose acidic humour helps them bond (with each other? the past?) even as it chokes and binds them.

Enid and Rebecca drift apart from each other, and if the best that can be said of the forces that push them apart is that it feels natural, and the best that can be said about the ending is that it feels like a metaphor, then the best that can be said about Ghost World is that I hope it’s still going on out there – that there are more strips to read, more pointlessly cruel diatribes, more ashen-faced oddballs in atrocious diners.

Perhaps I’ll find a new Eightball with a new Ghost World strop waiting for me at the bus stop one day, in which Enid and Rebecca will be together again, forever drifting apart. Probably not though, and hey, given that my nostalgia for the floppy, serialized version of Ghost World is every bit as affected and ironic as Enid’s punk rock shtick, maybe that’s exactly what I deserve…

You will be unsurprised to hear that WOLF EMOTIONS was giving the new Fight Club comic the hard sell in the shop the other day. Apparently Cameron Stewart is coming in for a signing, in theory he’s only going to sign copies of Fight Club 2 but I’m sure we could get him to stretch to some Batman underpants if we ask nicely.

Probably best to take them off and wash them before we make the request, mind.

Anyway, the comic itself is pretty much as you’d expect given who’s involved. If the book worked like a generational confession that was just novelistic enough to cast doubt on its own world view, and if the movie existed in a more open sort of conflict with itself due to the fact that it couldn’t help but try to sell you Brad Pitts by the box-load, then this represents the final triumph of Fight Club as product.

It’s a sequel so that might seem like a statement of the obvious, but just like Buzzfeed and Vice are made more evil by the fact that they publish some genuinely worthwhile stuff, the fact that this is an actual comic – worse, that it threatens to turn into a genuine collaboration – just makes it worse and more obvious. I could feel Eddie Campbell getting eggy over my shoulder while I read it, the pair of us getting increasingly fucked off with the surface level tricks, the scattered pills and petals that obscure faces and dialogue throughout.

You could even argue that the comic acknowledges its readership, gives them a twisted identification figure in the form of Marla, so horny for the destructive thrills of the source material – because this does not feel so much like a continuation as it does part of an extended universe, like Kieron Gillen writing what Darth Vader did on his holidays – that she doesn’t give a shit what feeding that monster brings, GamerGate: The Musical, Before Fight Club, the immolation of her own flesh and blood, whatever.

It’s still all very cleverly done, of course, but even that calls back to one of the movie’s more resonant exchanges:

“How’s that working out for you? “What?” ”Being clever?”

I know you had to go to a puppet to get a good read on the movie’s toxic masculinity – and thanks for the link, by the way, I’ve not watched it through yet but the first couple of minutes have convinced me that I can survive the gimmick – but this doesn’t require a reading, it calls out for harsher treatment. It’s an even more worrying symptom of our condition, I think: the inevitability of the commercial generic as a signifier for the unassailable nature of capitalism itself (remember: capitalism is one of Tyler Durden’s three enemies alongside women and the sea).

You wake up staring at an insect with a face pattern on its carapace, and while you might think that it’s smiling back at you, but it’s not; it’s just waiting for reinforcements. Before you know it? Bugs all over the floor, each one smiling up at you, its patterns more wild and believable than all the ones you’ve seen before.

Like I said, it’s no surprise that WOLF EMOTIONS is comfortable selling it – the guy’s comfortable publicly denying all human feelings for a laugh, he’s adapted to survive in this world, a bobble-headed Tyler Durden doll would cause him no blushes and of the bugs he’ll say nothing.

The perfect comic for that generation of white men Bobsy was talking about, then, the one’s who feel alienated from their labour but haven’t read any Marx? Sounds about right.

Maybe the book will show some understanding of all of this eventually.

In a way, I’d welcome that, but in another it would probably be even worse.

“So like with this second album we really wanted to just totally get away all the stuff that everyone associated with that first album y’know? Like, we really wanted to strip out a lot of the poppy stuff and just really let the tracks just like find themselves y’know? We’d been listening to a lot of Can, Neu! y’know Krautrock stuff but also like a lot of Italo-disco y’know? And that just totally informed the epic, spaced out grooves we kind of ended up with. And like we were really getting pressured to come up with a hit single, like something that the label could totally pitch to, I don’t know Radio 6 or something, but we were so totally against that, because like really we felt we’d really done that whole three minute thing y’know and Gavin was trying out this weird singing style, kind of trying for that Liz Frazer ethereal stuff y’know but with this real kind of screechy falsetto y’know, and he’d totally just given up with traditional vocals and moved into some kind of impressionistic moaning and shit y’know? Really pushing the boundaries. And Tiny Darren was just totally entranced with all that Bollywood soundtrack stuff so he was really into just bringing that vibe into the rhythm section and then Kath was really intent on everyone swapping instruments on the final track cos she’d been using Eno’s Oblique Strategies and wanted to get like a sort of Tortoise jamming thing going, but much more primitive and skronky y’know. Really bold, challenging stuff. And we were really really pleased with the way the whole album hung together, even though the label were really nervous about the fact that we sacked Terry Nuggins and ended up producing the whole thing ourselves, which I actually think really kind of brave actually, considering that Terry had just produced the Brontosaurus album, but we like knew that we’d done the right thing, the honest thing, y’know. And when the reviews came in they were mixed and kind of sometimes terrible and a lot of our fans like tuned out, like a lot, and we got fully dropped, but I still totally stand by the record. Y’know?”

“Listen mate, can I just get my burger?”

<ITEM> It’s an extra big portion of SILENCE!, the only podcast to have started in the Elizabethan era. ZOUNDS! Peppy new recruit Bobsy joins those grizzled street veterans, who are gettin’ too ol’ for this shit, The Beast Must Die & Gary Lactus.

As part of the London Graphic Novel Network’s roundtable on All Star Superman, Ilia put forward the following suggestions about the book’s ultimate meaning:

My sense is that there’s a religion to science move in the final issue – Lois believes that one day Superman will return, while Leo Quintum goes off to try and solve the problems of the universe on his own. Maybe Quintum isn’t just Luthor (first time I’ve seen that theory and like it a lot!), but the Superman of the future. That is to say: the representation of our collective 21st century aspirations.

The Quintum/Luthor angle has been played to death round my way, but the idea that the last issue represents a move from the religious to the scientific is genuinely intriguing. For me, the question is how we square that with Lex Luthor’s pantomime performance of smug, materialist arrogance, as captured perfectly by Marc Singer here:

The second half of the series highlights Superman’s capacity to inspire people, even (especially) as a purely fictional character. It’s the only power he has in our benighted world, and Morrison believes it’s the most important one he’s got. In fact, he says that if Superman did not exist, we would have to invent him (simply returning a favor, since Superman thoughtfully created us back in issue #10, March 2008; mark your calendars). That’s why the finale pits him against an antagonist who disputes the very idea that fictions and abstractions can hold real power, as seen in this exchange from issue #12:

WHITE: The truth sent you to the chair, Luthor!

LUTHOR: Is that right, Mister White? Funny, I don’t see the truth anywhere around, do you? I mean, what color is it? Can I touch it?

Luthor mocks White’s dedication to abstract principle, confronting him with the truth’s immateriality, because he’s a materialist to the extreme. He says the priest at his execution “stinks of the irrational” and his niece proclaims “This is Science Year Zero!”–next I suppose they’ll be rewriting the calendar. This scorn for idealism confirms Luthor’s stature as the series archvillain, especially since a hallucinatory Jor-El (himself part of “the field of living, fluid consciousness”) has just told his son he has given us humans ”an ideal to aspire to, embodied [our] highest aspirations.

Thankfully, I think Ilia has already suggested the answer to this question by noting that Quintum is both Superman and Luthor – a figure capable of aspiring to ideals and in working in the world to attain them.

As sneering, Kryptonian hard cases Lila and Bar-El note in issue #9, Superman is a scientist’s son, a curator of wonders who thinks his way around a problem as often as he smashes his way through it, leaving his many stand-ins (be they brawny, like Hercules and Sampson, or brainy like Lex) in the dust. Hell, for all his self-aggrandisement, Luthor spectacularly fails to see what’s right in front of his face when he gives Clark Kent a tour through his prison, and it’s hard to imagine his nemesis making the same mistake.

What to make, then, of Quintum as a replacement Superman?

What’s his purpose?

What does he have that Superman doesn’t?

Think back to Lex Luthor complaining about the fact that Superman doesn’t age at all in issue #1. More specifically, to Luthor’s comment about the lines that have started to appear in his mirror image, the cracks in the canvas that give the picture’s final theme away.

If, as I’ve suggested – and as Marc Singer argues in greater detail – All Star Superman presents Superman with a series of reflections of himself, it’s worth noting that Lex sets him off on this journey by making him mortal.

I don’t want to make too much of this point, but I keep coming back to those moments where Quietly and Grant give us a Superman who shows the wear of the world on him. I’m thinking of the Underverse story again, of course, but also of the Superman in issue #11 who slumps in his chair recording his final thoughts.

Luthor might lose in the end – worse, might actually get a chance to see things from Superman’s perspective – but he manages to put some lines on Superman’s face along the way. With a little bit of help from Frank Quitely, he briefly forces Superman to confront what he might look like if he was truly of this world.

This is all getting a bit Jesus again, especially given that Superman ends the story by becoming more otherworldly and miraculous than before. What role did Lex Luthor play in the bible again? It’s been a while since I read it, and anyway I only really liked some of those early issues, where they had the good inker.

So, given that I was supposed to be talking about Leo Quintum, where does he fit into this scheme? Unlike Lex, he’s able to see Superman as something to aspire to, rather than as something to bring down. Unlike Superman, he doesn’t need to be brought low to face the prospect of his own morality, and as the story ends he seems not to be at risk of sublimation. Grant Morrison is perhaps a bit too fond of William Blake-derived, “without contraries is no progression” style rhetoric, but it might be applied here as something other than an excuse for ineffectual confusion.

What does Quintum has that Superman doesn’t? Well, he’s one of us, and as we’re told at the climax of the Luthor/Superman battle (which remember, is won by a mix of brute strength and applied scientific knowledge)…

So, this is a serious item. Material is, what’s it coming out fortnightly? I could look, sometimes it’s fun to have a conversation like you’re not a robot, too. It doesn’t look like something that belongs in comic shops, it just doesn’t.

It’s frill-less, raw, politically engaged, arch, brash, “ripped from the headlines”…you know? Except this is so unusual in comics, especially not played out in some Liberal Agonistes morality play with wrestling costumes, you maybe don’t.

It’s a zine? It fires out more recommendations than a year of Transmetropolitan lettercols, it presents starkly the mobilising prison state of America in a way that – again, you’d go back to Boy’s story in The Invisibles to find anything similar. And that was couched in the language of conspiracy theory, back in the day when David Peace novels seemed to present unchecked power as somehow worse than it really was.

It isn’t something really seen, at all, certainly not with any accent on third-worldism, black nationalism, in our stories – there was an episode of The Good Wife, in fairness, and that programme always had a fairly astonishing bit of contemporaneity – but it is a fact that US prison populace is now five times what it was before Reagan got in, yet violent crime halved per capita. Try telling people crime is down here, or there, it has been steadily reducing for forty years – they literally will not believe you. It’s one of these things people Just Know, the “commonsense”

This is the opposite of escapist fantasy. This is exactly what comics needs, so far as I’m concerned, I am terrified the market is going to take one look at this, Kafka thru Dick but it’s real oh god it’s real, and turn tail. There should be other outlets, and this should be consumed serially. Clothes shops, material. Book shops, material.

See, we always hear how the nerds have won (looks like I picked the wrong time to get ripped and start wearing contacts) – see how Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan dress now, you can’t tell me it isn’t over, the suits and brutes don’t own the culture, we do, you do, I do – so now, what are you to do with it? Why not be fulsome, why not push…

okay, without getting carried away, but you’re all on the internet, you’re all commodified news & media hubs now, what is there to transmit? Here is something brave and ambitious and engaged, put it on.

]]>http://mindlessones.com/2015/05/25/material-1-by-ales-kot-will-tempest-tom-muller-and-clayton-cowles/feed/5All Star Superman: Man Made/The Gold In Ushttp://mindlessones.com/2015/05/20/all-star-superman-man-made-god/
http://mindlessones.com/2015/05/20/all-star-superman-man-made-god/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 13:13:53 +0000Illogical Volumehttp://mindlessones.com/?p=33127A few thoughts about working for Marvel/DC, as stolen from a Canadian friend who was trying to add a bit of clarity to my rant about Chip Zdarsky’s inability to say the name of Howard the Duck‘s “original creator”:

(1) In corporate comic, everyone is a scab because there is no union.

(2) In corporate comics, no one can be a scab because there is no union.

What to make, then, of Grant Morrison’s dedication to superheroes, his attempts to imbue them with some sort of positivist power of their own, to try and find transcendent meaning in a series of commercially dictated genre tropes and characters that were sacrificed to them? When presented straight, in Supergods, this stuff feels as silly and desperate as it is, like an attempt to put a fresh golden frame around a thrice-stolen turd in the hope of selling it on eBay again. But in All Star Superman? Not so much. The sales pitch here is a lot more successful.

I’m was being dumb and scatological there, for sure, but the emphasis on framing is appropriate. This is Grant Morrison’s most carefully crafted book, the one he says that he “wrote for the ages”:

It’s the one that comic fans really like. They like that, you know, that architecture… It’s literary, it’s not like a live performance. Like, you read The Invisibles a hundred times and it’s different a hundred times. If you read All Star Superman a hundred times you just understand it more.

In other words, as I think he’s said elsewhere, it’s his Alan Moore comic: twelve issues, immaculately constructed as a hall of mirrors instead of Watchmen’s inkblot test, with Superman wrestling with other versions himself issue after issue as he works hard to deal with the aftermath of his own murder.

In issue #3, Sampson introduces the idea of Superman completing “12 super challenges” before his death, and while trying to work out what these challenges are provides the reader with a hook this comment is more telling for its focus on the level of effort involved both within the story and in its creation. This is the book, after all, that starts with a three-panel origin story, then launches straight into a double page spread in which Superman flies into the sun to save the day. In other words, this version of Superman is no sooner born into this world than he is put to work to save it.

The remainder of the story follows suit, with our hero working at least two jobs as Superman and Clark Kent, maybe even more if you count looking after the museum/zoo that is The Fortress of Solitude, and working as a scientist – these latter two duties fill his time when he takes Lois Lane back to his gaff for a post-death sentence date.

This is where Frank Quitely and Jaimie Grant come in, because for all that this version of Superman spends the whole story in motion, the effort rarely shows. Here’s an exemplary All Star Superman panel:

In Frank Quitely’s previous work with Morrison and Grant on We3, he allowed the details of the environment to interrupt the procession of panels, giving every page turn a sense of latent chaos and danger. In All Star Superman, by contrast, Quitely’s composition is calm and steady throughout, with his unfussy page-long panels creating a feeling of steadiness and solidity that is given depth by Grant’s immaculate lighting. Quitely’s Superman rarely looks like he’s straining himself – as in the above image, you get a sense of his force from the effect he has on the world around him more than from the posture of the figure himself.

That’s why it’s the scientists on the furthest edges of the frame who show the most reaction to Superman’s herculean efforts: those closest to him can see only the calm of the man himself, so they share in his assured sense that he is at one with his labour.

This is what makes the trip to the “underverse” in issue #8 so disturbing. For the space of a whole issue, we are presented with a version of Superman whose efforts seem futile, whose companions reflect his own blatant absurdity, and whose physical form seems to be coming apart in front of our eyes. Quitely’s line work takes on an itchy, ragged quality; there seem to be more lines in Superman’s face here than there were before, and none of them are so clean and certain as we might have come to expect. In episode 8, US DO OPPOSITE, the reality of death is suddenly inescapable:

Superman may escape from this reality, but he is unable to bring Zibarro with him; again, there are limits on what he can achieve in this plane of existence, just as there are in ours.

On both sides of that little trip to hell, Morrison, Quitely and Grant work to imbue Siegel and Shuster’s creation with a sense of meaning and purpose, portraying him as a man who is able to work for the benefit of others even while facing the reality of his. Death happens to all of us, and work to most, but if few of us use the knowledge of the former to motivate us to do so much good for others then we may at least console ourselves with the fact that we’re better able to manage our romantic lives.

Unable to return Superman to his creators, the workers hired to toil on this particular version of Superman imagine an endless, looping fantasy wherein he is both created by and the creator of those who gave him life:

If Morrison’s rhetoric about Superman being “our greatest ever idea as a species” can be read as an act of complicit erasure of the character’s creators, this sequence from All Star Superman #10 is a more successful synthesis of hyperbole and reality. Here, the character’s origins in this world are recognised as part of the attempt to make them more than mere product.

“SUPERMAN YAY!” OR “SUPERMAN BOO!” – ???

But is this not merely a more effective form of marketing, one that provides the sharp-eyed, clear-headed reader with vision of work made good that is so beautiful as to convince them of what they know to be untrue? I’m voting “Superman boo!”, then, because I don’t want to feel like I’ve been fooled and because most of us are more like Siegel and Shuster than we are like the people who currently own their creation.

Another exemplary panel then, in which our hero takes up his place as an eternal labourer at the heart of the sun:

It’s an ambiguous image, in which Quitely’s Superman is frozen in the heigh of his power and confidence, servicing human need both inside the story and outside of it, but yet also unnaturally suspended, a #brand that just can’t won’t die. Faced with this, how can I do anything else but vote “Superman Yay!” as well? What can I say, I’ve got a Superman t-shirt and sometimes I wear it to both ask myself why we do so little with the capabilities we have, and to remind myself – as if I truly need reminding – of the ignoble nature or so much of our work.

Maybe we’ll finally get it right this time, or maybe it’ll just be another day in the office, but either way I’ll see you all later…IN THE NEXT EPISODE!

***

THE ABOVE IS AN EXCERPT FROM MY CONTRIBUTION TO THE LONDON GRAPHIC NOVEL NETWORK’S DISCUSSION OF ALL STAR SUPERMAN.

I’ll BE POSTING ANOTHER SELECTION ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN FAITH AND SCIENCE IN THE COMIC NEXT WEEK…

Out into the rocky, jagged cobalt blue terrain of Ferronar, where the sky-narwhals drift by like bloated rain clouds, the luminous krill-spore on their skin igniting their blubbery hides in a neon lightshow, fragmentary fire in the sky. Through the time-wastes of Norgg, where I saw my life spiral out in front and behind me, a chrysalis of confinement. My infant mewl and death cry joined each other in a note of pure harmony, ringing in my ears. The destiny web. Further now, further into the Unknown Territories where time becomes a fragile, lacy thing buffeted by the storms of Un-life, where celestial bodies of unimagined scale frolic and twist together in the heavens, while the Silent Wind blasts the landscape below, a mosaic of broken lands beyond belief. Further..further on…until.

A door. Before me, a door.

I knock.

“Yeah mate?”

“I have…your…pizza”

“Yeah mate, you should’ve been here an hour and a half ago, yeah? Thing’s probably fuckin’ cold now anyway. Take it back mate, not interested. Fuckin’ clown. Do one.”

———————-

Welcome yet, me hail, hairy hearties, to this new edition of the internet’s one and only comics lifestyle magazine show review podcast…SILENCE! With the Statler and Waldorf of comics podcasting, The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus. Or are they Piggy and Kermit? Or Bunsen and Beaker? Two Pigs in space? The Swedish chef and his favourite chicken? Big Bird and a scared child? The answer is yes.

]]>http://mindlessones.com/2015/05/19/silence-143/feed/10Multiversity: Superjudgehttp://mindlessones.com/2015/05/15/multiversity-superjudge/
http://mindlessones.com/2015/05/15/multiversity-superjudge/#commentsFri, 15 May 2015 18:40:57 +0000Andrew Hickeyhttp://mindlessones.com/?p=33103And in the end, the threat is the landlords. The literal landlady who is defeated by paying her $800, and the landlords of the mind, trying to gentrify the multiverse, to make it homogeneous, dull, and violent. The landlords from our world.

Neh-bu-loh the Hunter and the Empty Hand certainly seem to be related, if not the same, and both are fundamentally representations of our universe — a universe which was, as Morrison showed in JLA:Classified, corrupted by an infection from outside (from the DC universe, even). That universe is now invading the rest of the DC multiverse, and trying to bring it down to its own level, to streamline it, to homogenise it, to make it something suitable for corporate synergy; an endless EVENT, a conclusion that never comes but continues to arrive.

It’s not surprising that Multiversity was written at the same time Morrison announced a retirement from superhero comics. It is, in many ways, a final statement about them, and what it has to say is not very pleasant. The possibilities of superhero comics are nearly infinite, but they’re forced to fit the same old shapes, to fit the needs of giant corporations, of superhero fans, and of unimaginative “creators”. Morrison has been involved in what he considers a decades-long attempt to make the DC Universe gain sentience, and in doing so he has the characters realise that the biggest threat to them comes from us, from our universe.

For all that Multiversity addresses the reader over and over, it’s really a message to the characters, and to superheroes. Certainly, it has nothing to say about our world, except as our world affects, either negatively or positively, the production of serialised shared-world superhero stories. But it has a lot to say to the worlds in which the stories take place.

What it has to say seems to boil down to “you are currently Platonic forms, ideas, ideals. You have the chance to become real, to glory in flesh and blood, to get down in the dirt and the grime and the muck and actually live.

This is a two-edged sword.

You are a world, but you are also a mirror of worlds. The more real you become, the more corrupt, and the more you mirror this world. And there are entities in this world whose concerns are not your own, that do not share your ideals.”

And I think that’s as good a place to stop as any. You’ve been following this in real-time, as I write it, and now it’s 9:34PM on May 6, 2015. I have to be up in six hours. I’m off to deliver leaflets for a political party. It’s an organisation that exists to further ideals I believe in more strongly than I believe in reality, but which has to operate in a real world that’s messy, and full of compromise, and where the physical instantiation of those ideals is often corrupted. Where the battle against evil often turns good into a mirror of that which it fights, but where the battle still must be fought, because the evil is still worse. And I’ll be singing while I do it:

Hark the sound is spreading from the East and from the West,

Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best?

Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest,

The land was meant for the people.

Like I say, these comics have nothing at all to say about reality. At least, they aren’t saying it to us. But they’re warning the characters in the comic.